The Three Vancouvers

By Bill Mann

There’s a lot of confusion about all the Vancouver place names we have up here in the Pacific Northwest. And now that the Olympics have landed on top of one of them (and a few days before the actual Olympics start) , it might be a good time to clear them up. Curse you, explorer George Vancouver, for leaving such a large footprint in the Northwest and Canada’s Lower Mainland! (Just kidding, eh?).

I didn’t know them all, either, before I moved up here, and I’m a bit of a geography buff. Nothing personal, but I’m guessing many of you don’t have it straight, either. The three different geographical entities, briefly:

1. Vancouver, B.C.: The major Canadian city where the Games are actually being held. It’s near the U.S. border — most major Canadian cities are — about 100 miles north of Seattle.

2. Vancouver Island: A huge island just west of the city of Vancouver where British Columbia’s capital city, the elegant Victoria, is located. Vancouver , the city that is home of the Winter Olympics, is NOT located on Vancouver Island. Vancouver Island, by the way, extends much further south than Vancouver the city. And Victoria (at its southern tip) is almost the same latitude as Seattle.

3. Vancouver, Wash.: To make things more complicated, this medium-sized city (150,000 or so) about 300 miles south of the Olympic city of Vancouver sits just across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore. It’s well away from the two other Vancouvers. Yet it gets confused all the time with the Canadian city of Vancouver, even though the two cities are far apart. Lots of folks from this Vancouver do their shopping right across the river in Oregon, where there’s no state sales tax. And the fact that Oregon is only one of two states in the country where you’re not allowed to pump your own gas doesn’t seem to deter them.

OK, readers, have we got the three Vancouvers straight now? There’ll be a test tomorrow!